d20advancedfandomcom-20200214-history
Talk:Array
Designer's Notebook: Toning Down Array Versatility For some games, Alternate FX might provide too much versatility for too little price. While they are meant to represent different settings of the same FX, they can indeed be problematic for certain styles of gameplay. You might also simply want to represent different levels of mastery or capability with FX (so that not all new abilities in an array start of immediately as powerful as the base FX). You have a few options in this area which can help you to better tune Alternate FX and arrays to your liking for your game. In both cases, it is recommended that the GM allow players to use Focus normally to stunt a novel application of an FX, as there is very incentive in spending an action to use a significantly weaker ability. The downside to using these options is that players will tend to stick to their more powerful abilities in combat anyway favoring the more powerful, restricted set of abilities than the weaker, more versatile ones. Cost Control: You may decide that simply making it more expensive to acquire Alternate FX in general may help your game achieve a level of versatility you are comfortable with. * Half-Power: Each iteration of the Alternate FX Extra allows an FX only half the pool of character points that the base FX has (so it costs two character points to use the full pool of base character points for an Alternate FX, three to make it dynamic). This works especially well for games with very distinct levels of mastery of different abilities, particularly games with spellcasters, where the first application of Alternate FX buys the "apprentice"-level "spell", the second makes it a "journeyman"-level, and the third makes it truly the "master"-level spell. This option tends to make versatility nominally more expensive, and gives the GM the option to veto increases to arrays which threaten to grow too unwieldy. * Five-For-One: Alternatively, you can arrange it so that each application of the Alternate FX Extra buys only five character points worth of the base FX back. Under this option, it would take four applications of the Alternate FX feat to buy a new FX in an array It still encourages characters to stick to stay with similar abilities, offering a five-fold decrease in price, but it forces characters to work much harder and be much more selective about how they build up their versatility. Similar Alternate FX are Cheaper You might also decide to be more strict with the enforcement of the concept that Alternate FX are truly meant to be alternate "settings" for a base FX. So while it might be easy to take an Area Damage Alternate FX off of a Penetrating Damage FX, it might be more expensive to buy a Teleport in the same array. The rules for stunting a new FX with the Focus skill are a good guideline here, so the number of ranks of Alternate FX you need to buy an Alternate FX are as follows: * 1 Rank: Same base FX, different modifiers (Damage and Damage) * 2 Ranks: Same FX Types (Damage and Inflict; Category:Attack FX and Attack FX) * 3 Ranks: Different FX Types (Damage and Enhanced Senses; Attack FX and Sensory FX) JackelopeKing (talk) 18:26, March 12, 2012 (UTC)